Researching Corporate Social Responsibility Communication: Themes,Opportunities and Challenges

Growing recognition that communication with stakeholders forms an essential element in the design, implementation and success of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has given rise to a burgeoning CSR communication literature. However this literature is scattered across various sub‐disciplines of management research and exhibits considerable heterogeneity in its core assumptions, approaches and goals. This article provides a thematically‐driven review of the extant literature across five core sub‐disciplines, identifying dominant views upon the audience of CSR communication (internal/external actors) and CSR communication purpose, as well as pervasive theoretical approaches and research paradigms manifested across these areas. The article then sets out a new conceptual framework – the 4Is of CSR communication research – that distinguishes between research on CSR Integration, CSR Interpretation, CSR Identity, and CSR Image. This typology of research streams organizes the central themes, opportunities and challenges for CSR communication theory development, and provides a heuristic against which future research can be located.     

How Political Actors Co-Construct CSR and its Effect on Firms' Political Access: A Discursive Institutionalist View

This paper explores how corporate social responsibility (CSR) can incentivize political actors to increase firms' political access. Taking a discursive institutional perspective, I argue that the types of access negotiated depend on how political actors co-construct the multiplicity of CSR meanings. To study this process, I focus on the empirical case of the European Union (EU), offering a novel analysis of event observations, policy documents, and interviews with Commission officials, Euro-parliamentarians, and other stakeholders. I find that the value of CSR is highly contested in the EU political arena. I then elucidate four discursive strategies through which political actors interactively refined, reframed, and reinterpreted the meaning of CSR and its relevance for firm access in ways beneficial to their perceived interests. The findings highlight the importance for nonmarket strategy studies to conceptualize CSR as a co-constructed idea and access as negotiated, putting the micro-dynamic relationship between firms and political actors centre stage.     

Between a rock and a hard place: corporate elites in the context of religion and secularism in Turkey

Drawing on discourse analyses of 36 in-depth interviews with elite business people from Turkey, the study identifies the networking patterns of new and established business elites in the context of economic liberalization and socioreligious transformation of the country. Through a comparative analysis of the so-called secular and religious elite networks, we demonstrate the role of institutional actors such as the government, and identity networks, based on religion and place of birth in shaping the form and content of social networks among business elites in Turkey. In order to achieve this, we operationalize Bourdieu's notion of theory of practice and Granovetter's theory of social networks, illustrating the utility of combining these approaches in explicating the form and content of social networks in their situated contexts, in which power and divergent interests are negotiated.     

Talking Business: An Actor‐Centred Analysis of Business Agendas for Local Economic Development

Much of the recent literature about local governance of Britain’s cities has examined the power of a newly evolving ‘business elite’. However, in trying to understand changing governance forms, these analyses have generally lacked sensitivity to the role of actors (businesspeople) and their representative organizations. Analytical categories drawn from social movement theory (SMT) are introduced to develop a more actor‐centred approach to the role of business interests in urban management. While not attempting to claim that business represents a social movement within Britain’s cities, it does illuminate how effectively or otherwise businesspeople develop an identity based around their representative organizations and specific business agendas, define non‐business actors as opponents, and deploy and implement the agendas they create. We then use these SMT categories to examine the creation of business agendas in three English towns – Barnsley, Mansfield and Accrington.     

Playing on Two Chessboards: Reputation Effects between Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Corporate Political Activity (CPA)

It has recently been argued that corporate social responsibility (CSR) is ‘political’. It has been neglected however, that firms also operate politically in a traditional sense, in seeking to secure favourable political conditions for their businesses. We argue that there are potential synergies between CSR and corporate political activity (CPA) that are often overlooked by firms and that recognition of these synergies will stimulate firms to align their CSR and CPA. We develop a conceptual model that specifies how various configurations of a firm's CSR and CPA – alignment, misalignment, and non‐alignment – affect the firm's reputation beyond the separate reputation effects of CSR and CPA. This model has important implications for understanding how and why firms should pay attention to their CPA and CSR configurations, and thereby contributes to the broader issue of why firms should make sure that they are consistent in terms of responding to stakeholder concerns.     

Temporal Orientation and Corporate Social Responsibility: Global Evidence

There has been a growing emphasis on the importance of a long-term perspective in academia and practice. Yet understanding of the interdependency of those factors – the temporal preferences embedded in organizations and in societal values as well as the influence of temporal orientation of investors – remains limited. We theorize whether and how a firm's corporate social responsibility (CSR) is affected by the societal temporal orientation, its time horizon, and its investors' time horizon. Using a global sample, we confirm that CSR activity is higher when a country has a long-term orientation culture, when the firm has a long-time horizon, and when the controlling institutional investor has a long-term investment horizon. We also find that the national culture's long-term orientation heightens the effect of a firm's long-time horizon on its CSR. Further, our results show that the effects of temporal orientation are more pronounced in environmental than in social CSR.     

Why ‘Good Governance’ Fails: Lessons from Regional Economic Development in Colombia

By critically reviewing different strands of literature on institutional change and development, this essay argues that, in order to fully understand subnational economic development, we need to move away from ‘good governance' explanations in which geography‐specific analyses of power structures and elite interests are largely absent. Using findings for Colombia and insights from economic geography and heterodox political economy theories, this essay gives theoretical and conceptual guidelines and approximations for future studies on regional economic development. The contribution provides a place‐based discussion of how the historically evolved distribution of power balances, context‐specific elite interests, and the interaction between place‐bound actors and place‐less dynamics affect subnational institutional arrangements shaping policies and development outcomes. The conclusions drawn are not limited to Colombia and will prove beneficial to researchers studying regional economic development in subnational contexts elsewhere in the world.     

Management for Sustainable Development and Its Impact on Firm Value in the SME Context: Does Size Matter?

With the increasing demands from society towards sustainable and social responsible business practices, management for sustainable development has become a cornerstone to understand the success of many firms in the current competitive context. This article investigates corporate social responsibility (CSR) and examines the links between CSR practices and business outcomes – both financial and non‐financial (i.e. image and corporate reputation) – for small‐to‐medium sized enterprises (SMEs). In addition, we also attempt to determine whether the impact of such relationships is moderated by firm size. To this end, we carry out a quantitative study using PLS techniques to analyze a sample of SME owners and managers, with a view to test the proposed model in the light of social capital theory. In this sense, our study is pioneering in that it aims to determine – from a quantitative viewpoint – the degree to which firm size has a moderating impact on a series of relevant CSR‐driven outcomes. The data suggest that, in SME contexts, CSR impacts corporate reputation, brand image and financial value of the company. Importantly, we find that the larger the firm, the greater the intensity of the relationships linking CSR and business outcomes. Hence, our findings have important implications for CSR implementation in SME contexts. Finally, we provide a series of guidelines aimed at maximizing the effectiveness of CSR‐based business practices. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Corporate Social Responsibility in China: a Preferential Stakeholder Model and Effects

Research interest in examining corporate social responsibility (CSR) in developing economies is on the rise; however, our knowledge of the role of government in CSR remains limited. The aim of this paper is therefore to bridge this gap with an investigation into the specific CSR strategies that global firms have developed in the world's largest emerging economy and a nominally communist country, namely China. Drawing on institutional theory and a relational governance perspective, we posit that rather than adopting a canonical holistic CSR stakeholder model as typically observed in Western countries, these firms adopt a preferential stakeholder model using government‐aimed and consumer‐aimed CSR strategically. Our empirical study sampled 17 global retailers operating in China, with a dataset compiled to include their CSR web announcement data and firm performance data. The results of partial least squares modelling suggest that only government‐aimed CSR plays a salient role in enhancing retailers' performance. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Multi‐foci CSR perceptions,procedural justice and in‐role employee performance: the mediating role of commitment and pride

This study explores differential employee responses to perceived corporate social responsibility (CSR) treatment of social and non‐social stakeholder foci of the community, customers, shareholders and environment along with first‐party employee justice perceptions. At a finance‐sector multinational, we test the mediating role of commitment and pride in accounting for the relationship between perceptions of stakeholder treatment and in‐role performance. We propose and pilot a new multi‐foci CSR measure and include this in a mediated model within a separate study. Socially responsible treatment of customers and the environment play a role in predicting performance; these foci are related to either pride or commitment. Community CSR, first‐party justice perceptions and commitment predict performance either directly or indirectly. Our research shows an absence of any positive employee response associated with CSR towards shareholders. The study uncovers new insights into our understanding of complexities in employee responses to CSR activities.     

When Elites Forget Their Duties: The Double‐Edged Sword of Prestigious Directors on Boards

Previous research indicates that the performance effect of prestigious directors is ambiguous. Our study addresses this issue by integrating the theoretical lens of board capital and the institutional perspective. We argue that prestigious directors can bring benefits as well as costs. We claim that the emergence of these costs depends on the institutional context, specifically the institutional characteristics of the country's corporate elite circle which is characterized by the elite cohesion and the elite exclusiveness. Our empirical results with a 15‐country sample covering the period of 2005 to 2014 provide evidence for the overall existence of a positive performance effect of prestigious boards. However, our results also indicate that these beneficial effects of prestigious boards are mitigated in countries with high elite exclusiveness. Hence, under these certain institutional conditions, the elite‐favouring behaviour of prestigious directors also brings costs.     

Workgroup Climates and Employees’ Counterproductive Work Behaviours: A Social‐Cognitive Perspective

This research examines employees' anticipation of social and self‐sanctions as a self‐regulatory mechanism linking workgroup climates and counterproductive work behaviours (CWBs) and personality as a limit to these effects. A cross‐level study with 158 employees from 26 workgroups demonstrated that in groups with a high compliance climate – a climate emphasizing the importance of complying with organizational rules – employees anticipate more social and self‐sanctions, leading those low in conscientiousness and low in agreeableness to engage less frequently in CWBs. In contrast, a high relational climate – a climate emphasizing the importance of positive social relations over self‐interest – indirectly unbridles the CWBs of these employees by alleviating the social and self‐sanctions they anticipate for CWBs. Climates did not have indirect effects for employees high in agreeableness and high in conscientiousness. These findings elucidate why workgroup climates do not affect the CWBs of all members in the same way.     

Adoption and Coverage of Performance‐Related Pay during Institutional Change: An Integration of Institutional and Agency Theories

Whether or not to adopt and how extensively to use a newly legitimized practice are discrete decisions made by firms undergoing institutional change. The aim of this paper is to identify the distinct effects of economic, social, and political factors on the adoption of performance‐related pay practices and their coverage (i.e. the proportion of employees covered by the practices) by integrating institutional and agency theories. An empirical analysis is performed with a unique sample of Korean firms that experienced the East Asian financial crisis of 1997. The results show that while performance‐related pay adoption was influenced by economic and social factors, performance‐related pay coverage was related to political factors as well as economic and social factors. This finding suggests that while firms adopt performance‐related pay practices in search of legitimacy, they do not blindly imitate such practices but rather proactively adapt them based on economic efficiency considerations. This study makes valuable contributions to research on institutionalism and remuneration by empirically identifying the conditions under which a pay practice adopted for social legitimacy fits or fails to fit the economic needs of the adopters.     

Too Much of a Good Thing? The Boomerang Effect of Firms’ Investments on Corporate Social Responsibility during Product Recalls

Prior research shows that a good record of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has an insurance-like effect on shareholder value in negative events. We posit and provide empirical evidence that excessive CSR activities can also cause a boomerang effect during negative events. In the setting of product recalls, we show that overinvestment in CSR has a boomerang effect on shareholder value when a company with excessive CSR activities announces a recall. Further analysis shows that the boomerang effect is exacerbated when institutional ownership is low or when customer awareness is high. Our study adds to the literature new insights on how CSR affects shareholder value during a reputation crisis.     

Reconsidering the ‘Symmetry’ Between Institutionalization and Professionalization: The Case of Corporate Social Responsibility Managers

The assumption of a mutually supportive, ‘symmetric’ relationship between institutionalization and professionalization is central to the institutionalist perspective on professional work. Our inductive qualitative study of corporate social responsibility (CSR) managers in multinational corporations (MNCs) prompts to rethink the validity of this assumption. We show that as the institutionalization of CSR advances and consolidates, CSR managers are pushed to the organizational periphery. This indicates that the relationship between professionalization and institutionalization can be ‘asymmetric’ under certain conditions. To advance the study of this asymmetry, we develop a conceptual framework and a set of corresponding propositions that explain why some groups are able to advance their professionalization projects, while others cannot. Our study makes three main contributions to the literature: First, we explicate under which conditions the relationship between institutionalization and professionalization is more likely asymmetric than symmetric. Second, our explanation of the shifting organizational positions of different professional groups allows for further delineating occupational from organizational professionals. Third, we contribute to the CSR literature by examining the dynamic yet ambiguous role of CSR managers as driving forces behind the implementation of CSR.     

Conceptualizing businesses as social actors: A framework for understanding sustainability actions in small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises

Small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) can play a crucial role in advancing environmental and social well‐being. Yet various—often conflicting—explanations have been offered to clarify why SMEs pursue sustainability. Some arguments foreground possibilities of profit maximization, whereas others emphasize individual values and convictions. Research supporting such contradicting explanations is often biased towards large enterprises or small, innovative frontrunners. In this article, we examine the underlying drivers of social and environmental interventions of SMEs by exploring empirical data from a survey of over 1,600 Canadian SMEs and complementary in‐depth interviews. We argue that sustainability actions of SMEs can be understood by viewing these firms as social actors—organizations that are shaped by individual values, internal and external interpersonal relationships, and are embedded in a social environment. This conceptualization directs attention to the full range of factors that shape sustainability engagement of SMEs and highlights frequently overlooked forms of sustainability‐oriented actions.     

The Olympic Effect: Employee Reactions to Their Employer's Sponsorship of a High‐Profile Global Sporting Event

With companies investing vast sums of money on sponsoring high‐profile sports events, it is surprising that very little research exists to examine the possible impact that this has on the sponsors’ employees. This two‐wave panel study explores the indirect role that Olympic sponsorship and employee support for this sponsorship has on increases in organizational identification and discretionary effort—via, that is, pride and employee assessments of their employer's corporate social responsibility (CSR) credentials. The current study surveyed 241 employees (from three countries) in two phases across a 12‐month period in the run‐up to the 2012 London Olympics. Olympic sponsorship support was found to be positively associated with organizational pride and CSR perceptions, which both predict increases in organizational identification and discretionary effort (controlling for earlier baseline levels of these outcomes). In addition, there is also evidence of an indirect positive effect (through CSR perceptions and pride) of Olympic sponsorship support on increases in organizational identification and discretionary effort. The implications of these findings for decision makers considering sponsoring major sporting events are discussed; the findings provide interesting insights that can help HR functions to understand the consequences of sports sponsorship and processes involved that explain positive employee responses. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

The True Meaning of ‘Social Justice’: A Catholic View of Hayek

Hayek's well‐known dismissal of the concept of ‘social justice’ is examined and questioned. While basically agreeing with Hayek's critique, the author argues that we should not entirely reject this concept, although it is often used in a vague and emotional way – ‘social justice talk’. Drawing on the tradition of classical liberalism and Catholic social teaching, he makes the case for the true meaning of social justice, which applies to the basic legal and institutional framework of a society rather than the distributional outcomes of market processes.     

A Mesoeconomic Approach to Socioeconomics

Economics has developed extensive modeling of household, firm, and aggregated economy‐wide behavior utilizing rational actors. It has not developed social behavior analysis in as great of depth. The model presented here presents justification of the adoption of social norms by the individual as a method of examining the breakdown of social order by self‐identified subgroups and society in general.     

The Impact of Board Structure on Corporate Social Responsibility: A Temporal View

Time plays an important role in corporate social responsibility (CSR) decisions. In the context of time and the boardroom, the consideration of CSR can be affected by board structure. For example, because of considerable short‐term pressures, this study posits that insiders on the board are less likely to prioritize the longer‐term time horizons needed to affect CSR. Following this perspective, a hypothesis is put forth that insiders generally have temporal orientations that are more short term in nature and that they therefore have a negative effect on CSR. A study of 300 of Australia's largest firms confirmed this hypothesis. However, when inside director compensation linked to environmental and social metrics and inside director CSR training are introduced as moderating variables, their interactive effects lead to positive results: both positively moderate the negative insider–CSR relationship in environmental and social dimensions. The study contributes to a temporal view of boards of directors, as well as to corporate governance and CSR. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment